Ramblings from Dwarka

Preview of my Coffee Table book After a long gap I have begun rambling again on this blog. For quite sometime, my social media writing was restricted to facebook, which somehow constraints my writing. Then came along my book, For the Love of Mountains. I have more or less finished writing the book and the manuscript is with my editor. I discovered that writing a book is far more empowering and fun than social media posts. Blogging is something in between. As my fellow speaker Rajesh Srinivasan said recently, book writing is like test match cricket, blogging is like one dayers and social posts are like T20. So I decided to restart the one day format as well. This post is an advanced introduction of my book. For long I wanted to publish my photos. However, I realized that while the photos look great, there are stories behind each of them that never get told. Many of them are very interesting local stories of the region that are unknown to most of us city dwellers. So I began writing a co...

The nation has voted and so has Tamil Nadu. It is democratic right of the people to chose as they want. Also to be remembered is that because people have elected someone, the process hasn’t dry cleaned them. It is in this context that someone needs to view the decision of TN & Kerala voters in rejecting Modi and the rest of the nation overwhelmingly electing him for another term. In most states Modi’d BJP has received over 50% of votes polled, clearly a vast majority trusts him. There are a few states (TN, Kerala and AP) where BJP hasn’t polled 10% of the voted. Does it mean that those who voted Modi are right and those who didn’t are wrong? Does it mean that those who rejected Modi are the intelligent one’s and the rest are idiots? Here is my brief analysis and draw lessons. 1.      BJP as a right wing nationalist party: the masses don't care I don’t believe that the masses in our country recognize being a Hindu and proudly wear...

Har Ki Dun trek was the trek that got me outdoors and that was 9 years ago. Since then I have ensured that atleast once an year I am in the Indian Himalayas; Uttarakhand, Himachal and a lone trip to Kashmir every year and on a hike. Over the years, many of my friends have got introduced to these treks and some of them have become addicts like me and my family. For long some of them have been asking me to organize an easy trek.  So this year I chose to revisit Har Ki Dun in summer than post monsoon. I must confess that Har Ki Dun is an "easy" trek for the only reason that the trail is wide, well laid and gentle for most parts. The challenging part of this trek is the length; you walk significantly longer than in many trails. However, what is a trek without a challenge thrown in? And so it was on a Friday in May, a group of us left for Delhi. Our group consisted of 18 of us, 6 of us rotarians, their families and friends. My wife, Lakshmi, was the first one to sign up,...